Mnemosyne is a new work by Black Audio Film Collective member and seminal filmmaker John Akomfrah which was created as part of Made in England, a partnership initiative developed by Arts Council England and BBC English Regions.
Akomfrah was given access to the BBC's television, film and sound archives for Made in England, a project that reflects how England makes art and art makes England. He chose to focus on the experience of migrant labour in the West Midlands to create Mnemosyne, a poetic essay on the themes of memory and migration.
Mnemosyne refers to the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory in Greek Mythology. The belief was that those souls who chose to drink from the river of Mnemosyne, rather than from Lethe, would remember everything and attain omniscience. Akomfrah's work questions memory and suggests the possibility for endless re-interpretation of historical events by interweaving archival footage from 1960-1981, with contemporary 'portraits' of Birmingham and extracts of new work filmed in a remote snowy landscape.
Often referred to as 'film essays', Akomfrah's work involves the creation of quasi-fictional scenarios, a questioning of the evidence that we find in archival material. For Mnemosyne, he used the BBC archives as a starting point to explore attitudes, assumptions and understandings about life in the West Midlands during a key moment in Britain's immigrant history.
Material has also been drawn from MACE (Media Archive for Central England) and Birmingham Central Library; joining up archives in this way is one of the pioneering aspects of the project.
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